Ask the right questions, hire the right people

I remember Colleen Blake saying, at a CCCO workshop some years ago, that she read the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business to learn about staff management and human resources at the Shaw Festival. Smart manager.

The CCCO (Cultural Careers Council Ontario) website is, of course, home to the indispensable Work in Culture job listings, and the first stop if you’re looking for information on building a staff team, performance reviews, job descriptions, hiring, firing and much more.

But sometimes you find an article in the Report on Business that you wish you’d had beside you throughout your career. Sam Geist, a Markham based consultant, recently shared what he describes as the key questions to ask when hiring.

They’re based on the premise that strong candidates can be differentiated from weak candidates in very specific ways, such as: weaker candidates tend to generalize their experiences, can’t identify what they learned in any given situation, and focus on the incidentals of a job; stronger candidates are open about their weaknesses and mistakes, think about what they learned and what they would do differently, analyze their failures and successes and take responsibility for both.